COVID and overdose deaths have sharply cut U.S. life expectancy, with Indigenous peoples experiencing the biggest decline
With a few notable exceptions—such as during the 1918 influenza pandemic, World War II and the HIV crisis—life expectancy in the U.S. has had gradual upward trajectory over the past century. But that progress has steeply reversed in the past two years as COVID and other tragedies have cut millions of lives short.
COVID deaths drove much of the decline as the country grappled with the world’s worst pandemic in a century. But unintentional injuries—largely driven by drug overdoses—also played a significant role, the data show. Increases in deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and suicide also contributed.
Arias and her colleagues calculated life expectancy using a technique called a period life table. This involved the researchers imagining a group of 100,000 hypothetical infants and applying the death rates observed for the real population in 2021 for each year of those infants’ lives. The result is not the life expectancy for a cohort of actual babies born in 2021 but rather a snapshot of how life expectancy rates would apply to various age groups at a specific point in time, Arias says.
When the pandemic hit, Lee and her nonprofit organization helped distribute supplies such as masks and cleaning products to the Navajo Nation and the Apache Nations, she says. She also started Indigenous Health to help provide quarantine housing for Native American people exposed to COVID. Many of them had overcrowded housing—or no housing at all—to go back to, and some were struggling with addiction, she says.
Native American and Alaska Native individuals, along with Hispanic and Black people, suffered disproportionately high death rates during the pandemic’s first year because many worked in essential jobs with a high COVID exposure risk. But the group with the second-largest drop in life expectancy from 2020 to 2021 was the non-Hispanic white population. Almost half of the total loss of life expectancy of the white population occurred in the pandemic’s second year, Arias says.
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